There's a new REBOL like programming language in town. It's called Red, it's BSD licensed and contrary to REBOL and Boron, Red is a compiled language. The Syllable project is proud to announce that Red programs now run on Syllable Desktop. Here is a screenshot from a demo program. Syllable is the third Red target platform, after Windows and Linux.

LLVM JIT wasn't considered instead of the static compilation, it was considered period. The article and the Red roadmap explain that after the static compiler, a JIT compiler will be added early next year. This is needed to implement more REBOL features, because REBOL is an inherently dynamic language.

In such projects, there's always the dilemma of using existing projects or rolling your own. This could be called reinventing wheels, but that assumes that you would be happy with wooden donkey cart wheels on your new electric car.

REBOL is designed as a meta-language, a tool for others to develop languages with. This makes it especially suitable to bootstrap Red with. When evaluating what LLVM brings to the table in addition to that, it was apparent that it didn't justify the overhead. The current Red/System compiler, code generator and linker are implemented in a total of around 3000 lines. The compressed distribution package including a runtime and a test suite is currently around 100 KB. Compare that to LLVM and GCC and you'll see why they weren't needed.